Company in Germany

In order to successfully sell on German or British maretplace platforms, it is no longer necessary to establish a company abroad. You can do this by running a company in Poland. An exception is the Rakuten platform, which requires a company in Germany or the Bol.com platform, which requires a company in the Netherlands.

Company with a Tax residency

If, however, for other reasons you wish to set up an independent company in Germany, this is possible under the general rules available to any EU citizen or person with permanent residence in one of the member states. However, if you run an e-commerce business, you must meet a number of conditions to ensure that the German tax authorities do not consider your business a sham. So-called ‘mailbox companies’, i.e., companies registered at virtual office addresses, do not provide sufficient grounds for the German Tax Office to recognise such a company’s tax residency. If you encounter any issues with this, we can advise you on how to resolve them.

Non-self-employed branch office as an alternative?

Thanks to your business address, you can set up a so-called non-independent branch in Germany (unselbständige Betriebsstätte). From a formal point of view, this is an additional business address, with the difference that it is located in Germany. This formula, on the one hand, allows you to continue your business in Poland, and on the other hand, you gain the possibility to use the address in Germany for marketing purposes. It can be placed on an invoice as an additional address of the company, however, it is not a place of business within the meaning of tax regulations.

A branch in Germany will increase your credibility with retail customers in Germany as well as in other EU countries. If you don’t want to set up a separate company in Germany, but would like to take advantage of the many price comparison sites in Germany, e.g. gezihals.de keolkoo.de or preisvergiech.de, a branch can solve this problem.

Above all, the branch enables you to register a PayPal account with a German billing address. As a result, the commission on payments made by German customers is 1.9% (which can be reduced to 1.2%) instead of 3.9%. Additionally, you avoid PayPal currency conversion costs at an unfavourable exchange rate with a high spread. Thus you can save 5% on EUR payments from German customers and 4% on EUR payments from customers from other EU countries.